Integrating WordPress and Big Cartel

What’s the best way to integrate your Big Cartel shop with a WordPress website?

In this post, we’re looking at some of the technical considerations when creating a self-hosted WordPress site that integrates a Big Cartel shop. We recently completed a build for Blackbird, a contemporary crafts and arts shop in the Old Town in Margate, Kent, which involved combining a Big Cartel shop into a WordPress site.

Blackbird already had a Big Cartel shop and a separate website. They wanted to incorporate the two and rebuild the website in WordPress to make it easier to manage and update. The main requirement of the development was that the integration should be seamless – the user shouldn’t know they were going from one platform to another.

This part of the site is WordPress

  And this part of the site is Big Cartel. Can you tell the difference?

Why would you want to do this?

WordPress offers you amazing flexibility in creating and managing a website; Big Cartel offers you a secure e-commerce platform. While there are several options for creating online shops in WordPress, Blackbird preferred to stay with Big Cartel for their online shop but they wanted to expand their website to cover some of the aspects of the business outside the online shop – like their on-site craft workshops, press reviews and bespoke commissions.

So how do you integrate WordPress and Big Cartel?

To incorporate your Big Cartel shop into your self-hosted WordPress site, you need to follow the steps below. Remember that you need a paid Big Cartel account for full integration. This will allow you to use your own domain name for your shop rather than your-name.bigcartel.com.

Set up your self-hosted WordPress site

It’s assumed here that you already know how to do this. For Blackbird, we created a custom WordPress theme around their initial design. The front page has an animated slideshow featuring images that they can upload themselves. There’s a blog section, a press section that they can update themselves, and a page featuring bespoke commissions and customer feedback.

Update DNS records

In your hosting account, you need to update your DNS records. Create a new CNAME record for shop.your-domain.com to your-account.bigcartel.com (this Big Cartel article will create customised guidelines for you).

Set up your Big Cartel account

On the Big Cartel Settings page in the admin section, scroll down to the Store Domain field. Enter shop.your-domain.com here and click Save.

Once the DNS record has had time to propagate, your Big Cartel shop will appear as shop.your-domain.com.

In your WordPress theme, update the link on your ‘Shop’ button to point to http://shop.your-domain.com.

Customise your Big Cartel theme

Big Cartel is a long way behind WordPress in terms of theme support and customisation. However, it’s relatively straightforward to customise a basic theme and there’s plenty of guidance out there for how to do so. However, in brief, for Blackbird we:

• Created a front-page for the shop that presents the shop categories in a grid with an image associated for each category
• Used the same CSS from the WordPress site in the Big Cartel theme admin. This involved rewriting part of the layout.html page which is the basic wrapper for your Big Cartel site. We reorganised the navigation menu to incorporate buttons that link back to the WordPress site
• Updated the Home, Layout, Products, Cart and Checkout pages in Big Cartel so that the layout and design were consistent with the WordPress site
• Paid attention to things like the Add to Cart and Checkout buttons. It’s easy to update the appearance of these using CSS so that they’re in line with your WordPress theme

Top tips

• One of the simplest tricks to ensure a smooth transition between site and shop is to get the navigation menu identical between WordPress and Big Cartel. A single pixel jump when the user clicks from site to shop will give the game away.
• Download the entire Big Cartel theme and work on it locally.
• Turn off the admin bars in both WordPress and Big Cartel. It’s impossible to test your layouts are consistent otherwise.
• Always back up everything you do.

In summary

For a seamless integration between WordPress and Big Cartel, you need a self-hosted WordPress site and a paid-for Big Cartel account (Platinum and up). Create a new subdomain that maps to your Big Cartel shop. Use the same CSS between WordPress and Big Cartel to ensure a smooth user experience.

And if you need any help with this, just get in touch.

Posted on January 8, 2012